”Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains." ”Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains." Email ”Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains." These words were written by none other than the famous French philosopher and playwright Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau meant to argue that we as human beings are born free into this world, and yet from the moment we utter loud cries and take in our first breaths we are shackled by invisible chains. We become subject to the rules of the society we live in, we are given names, identities, races, cultures and perhaps, perhaps if one is lucky enough to be born in a free country like Sweden, he or she are endowed with freedom of choice and speech. One of the inherent freedoms you get in Sweden, where I live, is the freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is an inherent human right to voice one's opinion publicly without fear of censorship or punishment.

I could freely tell people that I hate Fredrick Reinfelt, the current Swedish Prime Minister and express my dissent through whatever means that is available to me against his Government, and yet no harm would come my way as we are free to express ourselves as we see fit within the confines of the rule of law in this country. Protection, in this regard is enshrined in the constitution of Sweden. A simple case in point in this regard and the holistic perception and practice of 'free speech' is the 'public' demonstration against the 'so-called ganging up' on Eritrea by the Swedish media that is scheduled to take place in the 7th of October in Stockholm by supporters of the Eritrean government. Some Swedish-Eritreans are planning to demonstrate and protest against the Swedish media. And I am sure they do not expect any threat or harm to come their way for taking part in that protest. They have the Swedish constitution to thank for that. But as a direct contrast to what's being unfolding here, in Eritrea no demonstration has taken place in the past 10 years, and it’s not because Eritreans are content with what goes in their country.

They are not content about the fact that the politics of their country has been a one-man-show for the past 20 years. They are not content with a president who publicly states that there won't be elections in Eritrea for the coming 40 years. They are not content with the fact that they are forcibly conscripted into the army for indefinite time. They are not content about the lack of basic provisions and so on. I could go on and on but I'm not so sure if I have enough ink to document all the discontents in Eritrea in this article. In short, in Eritrea, if you express your opposition to the government, if you express your dissent in any way let alone publicly demonstrate, you would be jailed in an undisclosed location, a prison in which even your closest family can't visit you and without access to a lawyer or a court of law. You would languish in jail; perhaps die there too, just like those who have died. It is very important to go backward in to the history of Eritrea to understand what is happening in Eritrea today and look for a solution.

The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) is the only party that is ruling the country. From its inception was one of the most politically closed movements in the world. As a guerilla movement combating against a conventional army, one may expect a certain degree of closed political culture. However, after Eritrean independence, the closed political culture continued pervasively and intensively. High level government officials, journalists, businessmen, intellectuals, common people from all walks of life, and above all religious leaders – who have nothing to do with politics, were sent to prison and none of them appeared in a court of law. To exacerbate matters further, the Government of Eritrea, fearing for possible criticism from private media outlets, and to keep the general public in darkness, parallel to the mass imprisonment of citizens, closed all private media outlets in September 2001. Thus, the ban of the private media transformed the Eritrean Government into a full-fledged, strong, unparalleled totalitarian government in the contemporary world. At international platforms, the little country at the coast of the Red Sea became one of the notorious threats to democracy, rule of law, basic human rights, and international norms.

It’s no wonder my country is those days is referred as the 'North Korea of Africa’ informally. Just ten years back, on the 23rd of September 2001 ten journalists working in the private media were arrested in Eritrea. One of them, Dawit Isaac, a Swedish national of Eritrean descent, was among those journalists. At the same moment, all the private press was closed. How would you feel if the Swedish government decided to close all the private press including Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Metro, City and Expressen in the same day? The case of Dawit is too big to examine in this article. However, I would like to point out that Dawit held dual nationalities. He was a Swedish national, who paid his taxes in this country, and he was also an Eritrean. Supporters of the Eritrean Government can't keep on insisting that his case be left alone as he is an Eritrean and only for Eritreans to deal with. Dawit is lucky to be Swedish. The Swedish Government and media have called time and again for his release.

To say the least, his family is taken care of through moral support. I wish I could say it is the same for the families of about other imprisoned journalists like Amanuel Asrat, Medhanie Habte and Said Abdelkadir. All those journalists that are detained in my country are still held incommunicado and are yet to be charged or tried for any offence. They are not allowed any contact with the outside world or with each other. An important question that I should ask the reader at this junction is how does it feel when you learn that a person has been held hostage in an indefinite location by an authority without the due process of law? A place nobody knows, including his immediate family members? How about if you come to realize that it is not only one person but thousands of them? This is the reality of my little home country Eritrea. So what you and I take for granted in Sweden and the west, unfortunately, lacks elsewhere, especially in Eritrea. The crackdown on private press hurt my country. For those newspapers provided detailed information on issues of high importance to national interest. Traditionally, the Eritrean Government has a history of providing incomplete, complicated and highly jargoned information with the objective of obscuring the truth.

Thus, through continuous probes, interviews, and investigations the private newspapers provided detailed information to the general public. Not only this but the Eritrean private media outlets were seen by many as catalysts of democratic transformation and many appreciated their services in the provision of alternative information to the general public. Somehow, the common truth managed to emerge from chaotic pile of information and is information. A quest for objectivity was the result. But After September 2001, Eritrea became a closed state where information is highly monopolized among few government officials. Let alone the general public, even members of the government are not told what is happening around. Thus, this time only few privileged officials and most of them higher army commanders and security personnel - which constitute a small slice of the Eritrean population - have monopoly of information. This is one of the reasons why the Government of Eritrea still has supporters; all those who still support the brutal regime tend to be misinformed expats living outside their country and choose to believe the lies they see on Eri-TV, the government owned and only TV station in Eritrea. To this date, issues of great importance to the people are rarely covered by government media in Eritrea.

There are people who try to get information from the internet, however as Eritrea has low internet penetration – which is between 2.5 – 3%, and as individuals who visit independent websites are severely punished, there is no way where people could get independent information. Alternatively the general public depends on rumors. Frequently, rumors circulate for several weeks before their official release. Perhaps all this sounds like a nightmare in Sweden, but this is the actual reality for 4 million Eritreans living in Eritrea. Let me conclude by giving a brief answers for those supporters of government who are accusing me of being a paid-agent and a traitor for my activism against the brutal regime in my country. First off, there has been that issue about the 2% income tax imposed on Eritreans living in the Diaspora. In fact, according to Alenalki.com ( a pro-government Eritrean website) , The documentary was produced by Eritreans, unlike what the writers at Alenalki state, and it has been written, researched and filmed by Voice of Meselna Delina, a radio station belonging to the opposition.

SVT's role was following our work and of course, they used our film in the documentary. According to the same website, at this time the intention of the Swedish media is to "simply blackmail the country and degrade its citizens through hiring mercenaries with hidden cameras to get in to the Eritrean Embassy as if it was a place of illegal criminals." We're no hired mercenaries, and all of us are Eritreans, Eritreans who are deeply disturbed by the evil that has taken hold of our beloved country for which our brothers, sisters, fathers and mothers have paid their lives for. As for the part that says "Sooner or later the intruders shall be put to justice", we can hardly wait, as that would mean having us tried in a legal court of law and that we'd have access to lawyers and we still would be protected by a constitution, which unfortunately, still lacks in Eritrea. If you are so unhappy with the Swedish government and Swedish media, why not move back to Eritrea? A country ruled by one man, one party, where there is no freedom of speech, no constitution and where there are more prisons than schools?

If you wish to return I will be more than happy to provide one way plane ticket to Asmara. Let me conclude by quoting Rousseau once again. Along the same sentence in which he wrote his former quote, he also wrote "those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they." Meron Estefanos Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Wikiquote Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jump to: navigation , search Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( June 28 , 1712 – July 2 , 1778 ) was a Franco-Swiss philosopher of Enlightenment whose political ideas influenced the French Revolution , the development of socialist theory, and the growth of nationalism. See also: A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue. All that time is lost which might be better employed. As quoted in A Dictionary of Quotations in Most Frequent Use: Taken Chiefly from the Latin and French, but comprising many from the Greek, Spanish, and Italian Languages, translated into English (1809) by David Evans Macdonnel L'accent est l'âme du discours.

Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth. English translation as quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 2. An honest man nearly always thinks justly. As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 277. A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue. As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 301. Days of absence, sad and dreary, Clothed in sorrow's dark array,— Days of absence, I am weary: She I love is far away. Day of Absence, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Chère amie, ne savez-vous pas que la vertu est un état de guerre, et que, pour y vivre, on a toujours quelque combat à rendre contre soi? Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it means one always has some battle to wage against oneself. Julie, or The New Heloise (English), Part Six, Letter VII Response, pg 560 What good would it be to possess the whole universe if one were its only survivor? A Lasting Peace Through the Federation of Europe (1756) L'offenseur ne pardonne jamais. [1] Translation: The offender never forgives. Émile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires, "Lettre Première" (1781) Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750)[ edit ] Book I[ edit ] Two conflicting types of educational systems spring from these conflicting aims. One is public and common to many, the other private and domestic. If you wish to know what is meant by public education, read Plato's Republic.

Those who merely judge books by their titles take this for a treatise on politics, but it is the finest treatise on education ever written. In popular estimation the Platonic Institute stands for all that is fanciful and unreal. For my own part I should have thought the system of Lycurgus far more impracticable had he merely committed it to writing. Plato only sought to purge man's heart; Lycurgus turned it from its natural course. The public institute does not and cannot exist, for there is neither country nor patriot. The very words should be struck out of our language. The reason does not concern us at present, so that though I know it I refrain from stating it. Book II[ edit ] Let us not forget what befits our present state in the pursuit of vain fancies. Mankind has its place in the sequence of things; childhood has its place in the sequence of human life; the man must be treated as a man and the child as a child. Give each his place, and keep him there. Control human passions according to man's nature; that is all we can do for his welfare. The rest depends on external forces, which are beyond our control.

There is only one man who gets his own way—he who can get it single-handed; therefore freedom, not power, is the greatest good. That man is truly free who desires what he is able to perform, and does what he desires. This is my fundamental maxim. Apply it to childhood, and all the rules of education spring from it. Society has enfeebled man, not merely by robbing him of the right to his own strength, but still more by making his strength insufficient for his needs. This is why his desires increase in proportion to his weakness; and this is why the child is weaker than the man. If a man is strong and a child is weak it is not because the strength of the one is absolutely greater than the strength of the other, but because the one can naturally provide for himself and the other cannot. Thus the man will have more desires and the child more caprices, a word which means, I take it, desires which are not true needs, desires which can only be satisfied with the help of others. Book III[ edit ] Our island is this earth; and the most striking object we behold is the sun. As soon as we pass beyond our immediate surroundings, one or both of these must meet our eye.

Thus the philosophy of most savage races is mainly directed to imaginary divisions of the earth or to the divinity of the sun. As a general rule—never substitute the symbol for the thing signified, unless it is impossible to show the thing itself; for the child's attention is so taken up with the symbol that he will forget what it signifies. As soon as we have contrived to give our pupil an idea of the word "Useful," we have got an additional means of controlling him, for this word makes a great impression on him, provided that its meaning for him is a meaning relative to his own age, and provided he clearly sees its relation to his own well-being. This word makes no impression on your scholars because you have taken no pains to give it a meaning they can understand, and because other people always undertake to supply their needs so that they never require to think for themselves, and do not know what utility is. "What is the use of that?" At first our pupil had merely sensations, now he has ideas; he could only feel, now he reasons. For from the comparison of many successive or simultaneous sensations and the judgment arrived at with regard to them, there springs a sort of mixed or complex sensation which I call an idea.

The way in which ideas are formed gives a character to the human mind. The mind which derives its ideas from real relations is thorough; the mind which relies on apparent relations is superficial. He who sees relations as they are has an exact mind; he who fails to estimate them aright has an inaccurate mind; he who concocts imaginary relations, which have no real existence, is a madman; he who does not perceive any relation at all is an imbecile. Clever men are distinguished from others by their greater or less aptitude for the comparison of ideas and the discovery of relations between them. Simple ideas consist merely of sensations compared one with another. Simple sensations involve judgments, as do the complex sensations which I call simple ideas. In the sensation the judgment is purely passive; it affirms that I feel what I feel. In the percept or idea the judgment is active; it connects, compares, it discriminates between relations not perceived by the senses. That is the whole difference; but it is a great difference. Nature never deceives us; we deceive ourselves.

Book IV[ edit ] The origin of our passions, the root and spring of all the rest, the only one which is born with man, which never leaves him as long as he lives, is self-love; this passion is primitive, instinctive, it precedes all the rest, which are in a sense only modifications of it. In this sense, if you like, they are all natural. But most of these modifications are the result of external influences, without which they would never occur, and such modifications, far from being advantageous to us, are harmful. They change the original purpose and work against its end; then it is that man finds himself outside nature and at strife with himself. Complete ignorance with regard to certain matters is perhaps the best thing for children; but let them learn very early what it is impossible to conceal from them permanently. Either their curiosity must never be aroused, or it must be satisfied before the age when it becomes a source of danger. Your conduct towards your pupil in this respect depends greatly on his individual circumstances, the society in which he moves, the position in which he may find himself, etc.

Nothing must be left to chance; and if you are not sure of keeping him in ignorance of the difference between the sexes till he is sixteen, take care you teach him before he is ten. Book V[ edit ] As a man's conduct is controlled by public fact, so is her religion ruled by authority. The daughter should follow her mother's religion, the wife her husband's. Were that religion false, the docility which leads mother and daughter to submit to nature's laws would blot out the sin of error in the sight of Goddess. Unable to judge for themselves they should accept the judgment of father and husband as that of the church. While men unaided cannot deduce the rules of their faith, neither can they assign limits to that faith by the evidence of reason; they allow themselves to be driven hither and thither by all sorts of external influences, they are ever above or below the truth. Extreme in everything, they are either altogether reckless or altogether pious; you never find them able to combine virtue and piety. Their natural exaggeration is not wholly to blame; the ill-regulated control exercised over them by men is partly responsible.

Loose morals bring religion into contempt; the terrors of remorse make it a tyrant; this is why women have always too much or too little religion. As a woman's religion is controlled by authority it is more important to show her plainly what to believe than to explain the reasons for belief; for faith attached to ideas half-understood is the main source of fanaticism, and faith demanded on behalf of what is absurd leads to madness or unbelief. Whether our catechisms tend to produce impiety rather than fanaticism I cannot say, but I do know that they lead to one or other. In the first place, when you teach religion to little girls never make it gloomy or tiresome, never make it a task or a duty, and therefore never give them anything to learn by heart, not even their prayers. Be content to say your own prayers regularly in their presence, but do not compel them to join you. Let their prayers be short, as Christ himself has taught us. Let them always be said with becoming reverence and respect; remember that if we ask the Almighty to give heed to our words, we should at least give heed to what we mean to say.

When you reached the age of reason, I secured you from the influence of human prejudice; when your heart awoke I preserved you from the sway of passion. Had I been able to prolong this inner tranquillity till your life's end, my work would have been secure, and you would have been as happy as man can be; but, my dear Emile, in vain did I dip you in the waters of Styx, I could not make you everywhere invulnerable; a fresh enemy has appeared, whom you have not yet learnt to conquer, and from whom I cannot save you. That enemy is yourself. Nature and fortune had left you free. You could face poverty, you could bear bodily pain; the sufferings of the heart were unknown to you; you were then dependent on nothing but your position as a human being; now you depend on all the ties you have formed for yourself; you have learnt to desire, and you are now the slave of your desires. Without any change in yourself, without any insult, any injury to yourself, what sorrows may attack your soul, what pains may you suffer without sickness, how many deaths may you die and yet live! A lie, an error, a suspicion, may plunge you in despair.

It is a mistake to classify the passions as lawful and unlawful, so as to yield to the one and refuse the other. All alike are good if we are their masters; all alike are bad if we abandon ourselves to them. Nature forbids us to extend our relations beyond the limits of our strength; reason forbids us to want what we cannot get, conscience forbids us, not to be tempted, but to yield to temptation. To feel or not to feel a passion is beyond our control, but we can control ourselves. Every sentiment under our own control is lawful; those which control us are criminal. A man is not guilty if he loves his neighbour's wife, provided he keeps this unhappy passion under the control of the law of duty; he is guilty if he loves his own wife so greatly as to sacrifice everything to that love. Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1765-1770; published 1782)[ edit ] Book I[ edit ] I have entered on an enterprise which is without precedent, and will have no imitator. I propose to show my fellows a man as nature made him, and this man shall be myself.

I I know my heart, and have studied mankind; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature did wisely in breaking the mould with which she formed me, can only be determined after having read this work. Variant translations: I may not be better than other people, but at least I am different. If I am not better, at least I am different. Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood.

Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous and sublime; even as thou hast read my inmost soul: Power eternal! assemble round thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and, if he dare, aver, I was better than that man. Variant translation: Let the trumpet of the day of judgment sound when it will, I shall appear with this book in my hand before the Sovereign Judge, and cry with a loud voice, This is my work, there were my thoughts, and thus was I. I have freely told both the good and the bad, have hid nothing wicked, added nothing good. J'adore la liberté; j'abhorre la gêne, la peine, l'assujettissement.

Tant que dure l'argent que j'ai dans ma bourse, il assure mon indépendance; il me dispense de m'intriguer pour en trouver d'autre, nécessité que j'eus toujours en horreur; mais de peur de le voir finir, je le choie. L'argent qu'on possède est l'instrument de la liberté; celui qu'on pourchasse est celui de la servitude. I love liberty, and I loathe constraint, dependence, and all their kindred annoyances. As long as my purse contains money it secures my independence, and exempts me from the trouble of seeking other money, a trouble of which I have always had a perfect horror; and the dread of seeing the end of my independence, makes me proportionately unwilling to part with my money. The money that we possess is the instrument of liberty, that which we lack and strive to obtain is the instrument of slavery.

XII Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (published 1782)[ edit ] What I had to say was so clear and I felt it so deeply that I am amazed by the tediousness, repetitiousness, verbiage, and disorder of this writing. What would have mad it lively and vehement coming from another's pen is precisely hat has made it dull and slack coming from mine. The subject was myself, and I no longer found on my own interest that zeal and vigor of courage which can exalt a generous soul only for another person's cause. On the Subject and Form of This Writing There as here, passions are the motive of all action, but they are livelier, more ardent, or merely simpler and purer, thereby assuming a totally different character. All the first movements of nature are good and right. First Dialogue Beings who are so uniquely constituted must necessarily express themselves in other ways than ordinary men. It is impossible that with souls so differently modified, they should not carry over into the expression of their feelings and ideas the stamp of those modifications.

First Dialogue As for the Soothsayer , although I am certain no one feels the true beauties of that work better than I, I am far from finding these beauties in the same places as the infatuated public does. They are not the products of study and knowledge, but rather are inspired by taste and sensitivity. First Dialogue I want you to read the true system of the heart, drafted by a decent man and published under another name. I do not want you to be biased against good and useful books merely because a man unworthy of reading them has the audacity to call himself the Author. First Dialogue Through the fortunate effect of my frankness, I had the rarest and surest opportunity to know a man well, which is to study him at leisure in his private life and living, so to speak, with himself. For he share himself without reservation and made me feel as much at home in his house as in mine. I had almost no other abode than his own. Second Dialogue Much more naturally than you do: because flight is a much more natural consequence of fear than of hate. He doesn't flee men because he hates them, but because he is afraid of them.

He doesn't flee them in order to harm them, but to try o escape the harm they wish to do to him. They, on the contrary, don't seek him through friendship, but through hate. They seek him and he flees from them just as in the wilderness of Africa, where there are few men and many tigers, the men flee the tigers the men flee the tigers and the tigers seek the men. Second Dialogue Let's not be dazzled by the sententious glitter with which error and lying often cover themselves. Society is not created by the crowd, and bodies come together in vain when hearts reject each other. The truly sociable man is more difficult in his relationships than others; those which consist only in false appearances cannot suit him. He prefers to live far from wicked men without thinking about them, than to see them and hate them. He prefers to flee his enemy rather than seek him out to harm him. A person who knows no other society than that of the heart will not seek his society in your circles. That is How J.J. must have thought and behaved before the conspiracy of which he is the object.

Second Dialogue A - F[ edit ] ...whatever his ambiguities of his legacy in respect of totalitarianism , there is no doubt that Rousseau is the key figure in the development of democratic thought...it was Rousseau who developed the concept of sovereignty of the people , and he was the first to insist upon the fitness and right of the ordinary people to participate in the political system as full citizens. Ian Adams and R. W. Dyson, Fifty Major Political Thinkers, Routledge , 2003. Binary distinctions are not necessarily motivated by a desire to dominate. David Spurr (1993: 103) discusses the ways in which Rousseau, in the Essay on the Origin of Languages, attempts to validate the ‘life and warmth’ of Oriental languages such as Arabic and Persian. But in employing the ‘logic and precision’ of Western writing to do so, Rousseau effectively negates these languages because they become characterized by a primitive lack of rational order and culture. Although setting out to applaud such languages, he succeeds in confirming the binary between European science, understanding, industry and writing on the one hand, and Oriental primitivism and irrationality on the other.

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (2000). Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, second edition, London: Routledge , p. 20, citing Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and Imperial Administration, Durham and London: Duke University Press. The best-known expression of the idea of the ‘noble savage’ is in Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality (1755). The concept arises in the eighteenth century as a European nostalgia for a simple, pure, idyllic state of the natural, posed against rising industrialism and the notion of overcomplications and sophistications of European urban society. This nostalgia creates an image of other cultures as part of Rousseau’s criticism of the failure, as he perceived it, of modern European societies to preserve and maintain the natural innocence, freedom and equality of man in a ‘natural’ state. It creates images of the savage that serve primarily to re-define the European. The crucial fact about the construction is that it produces an ostensibly positive oversimplification of the ‘savage’ figure, rendering it in this particular form as an idealized rather than a debased stereotype.

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (2000). Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, second edition, London: Routledge, p. 193 It seems to me imperative to re-establish the true dualism—that between vital impulse and vital control—and to this end to affirm the higher will first of all as a psychological fact. The individual needs, however, to go beyond this fact if he is to decide how far he is to exercise control in any particular instance with a primary view to his own happiness: in short, he needs standards. To secure standards, at least critically, he cannot afford, like the Rousseauist, to disparage the intellect. Irving Babbitt , "What I Believe" (1930), Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings (1981), pp. 14-15 The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight are developed, is twenty years.

Now during the ten fairest years of his life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his life, his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately that irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature. During this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society. “Why don’t they get married?” cries a religious woman. But what father of good sense would wish his son to be married at twenty years of age? Is not the danger of these precocious unions apparent at all? It would seem as if marriage was a state very much at variance with natural habitude, seeing that it requires a special ripeness of judgment in those who conform to it. All the world knows what Rousseau said: “There must always be a period of libertinage in life either in one state or another.

It is an evil leaven which sooner or later ferments.” Now what mother of a family is there who would expose her daughter to the risk of this fermentation when it has not yet taken place? Honore de Balzac (1829) The Physiology of Marriage; or, the Musings of an Eclectic Philosopher on the Happiness and Unhappiness of Married Life “Meditation IV: On the Virtuous Woman” Rousseau’s unforgivable crime was his rejection of the graces and luxuries of civilized existence. Voltaire had sung “The superfluous, that most necessary thing." For the high bourgeois standard of living Rousseau would substitute the middling peasant’s. It was the country versus the city – an exasperating idea for them, as was the amazing fact that every new work of Rousseau’s was a huge success, whether the subject was politics, theater, education, religion, or a novel about love. Jacques Barzun , From Dawn to Decadence (2001).

...As with any truly great writer, it is foolish to judge Rousseau by the instances where people tried to follow his advice literally, still less by the harmful things done in his name (by which standard Jesus Christ does not exactly come off unblemished.) Rousseau’s influence on modern culture has been far too vast and multifaceted to squeeze into reductive categories of “positive” and “negative” and even his most misguided prescriptions often came accompanied by profound and poetic insights. David A. Bell, "Happy Birthday to Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Why the World’s First Celebrity Intellectual Still Matters", New Republic , June 22nd, 2012. For Rousseau, man’s nature is essentially good, but he was corrupted by various “advances” in human civilization (especially the institution of private property). Although man’s natural “innocence” has been lost, Rousseau thought that it could be replaced by a new form of moral goodness through the establishment of new political institutions. When we compare this to St. Augustine , we can see what a departure this is from the mainstream of Pauline Christianity.

Augustine held that man is inescapably sinful and concludes that, as such, the City of God cannot be achieved on earth. Rousseau’s major contribution to the foundation of socialist thought is in his rejection of human sinfulness and his commitment to human improvement through institutional change. With this foundational belief, he set the stage for perfectionist political doctrines that moved focus from “the next world” of Christianity by arguing that this world can be transformed into “heaven on earth.” Nicholas Buccola, “‘The Tyranny of the Least and the Dumbest’: Nietzsche’s Critique of Socialism,” Quarterly Journal of Ideology, Volume 31, 2009, 3 &4, italics as in original The assembly [in revolutionary France] recommends to its youth a study of the bold experimenters in morality. Everybody knows that there is a great dispute amongst their leaders, which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all resemble him. His blood they transfuse into their minds and into their manners.

Him they study; him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day, or the debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his life he is their canon of Polycletus ; he is their standard figure of perfection. To this man and this writer, as a pattern to authors and to Frenchmen, the foundries of Paris are now running for statues, with the kettles of their poor and the bells of their churches. If an author had written like a great genius on geometry, though his practical and speculative morals were vicious in the extreme, it might appear, that in voting the statue, they honoured only the geometrician. But Rousseau is a moralist, or he is nothing. It is impossible, therefore, putting the circumstances together, to mistake their design in choosing the author with whom they have begun to recommend a course of studies. G - L[ edit ] Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children.

School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. [Alexander] Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. John Taylor Gatto (2009), Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, p. xxi [W]hat truly makes the French Revolution the first fascist revolution was its effort to turn politics into a religion. (In this the revolutionaries were inspired by Rousseau, whose concept of the general will divinized the people while rendering the person an afterthought.) Jonah Goldberg (2007). Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. NY: Doubleday, ISBN 9780385511841 , p.

13 Robespierre ’s ideas were derived from his close study of Rousseau, whose theory of the general will formed the intellectual basis for all modern totalitarianisms. According to Rousseau, individuals who live in accordance with the general will are “free” and “virtuous” while those who defy it are criminals, fools or heretics. Those enemies of the common good must be forced to bend to the general will. He described this state-sanctioned coercion in Orwellian terms as the act of “forcing men to be free.” It was Rousseau who originally sanctified the sovereign will of the masses while dismissing the mechanisms of democracy as corrupting and profane. Such mechanics -- voting in elections, representative bodies, and so forth -- are “hardly ever necessary where the government is well-intentioned,” wrote Rousseau in a revealing turn of phrase. Jonah Goldberg (2007). Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. NY: Doubleday, ISBN 9780385511841 , p. 39 Marx , like Rousseau before him, believed that men are good and made bad only by bad social systems.

Unlike Rousseau, he believed that these systems arise from historical necessity. It occurred neither to Marx nor to Rousseau-as it did to Madison -that bad men corrupt good systems just as often as vice versa. Ernest Van Den Haag, “Marxism as Pseudo-Science,” Reason Papers No. 12 (Spring 1987) pp. 26-32. This peculiar thinker - although often described as irrationalist or romantic - also latched on to and deeply depended on Cartesian thought. Rousseau's heady brew of ideas came to dominate 'progressive' thought, and led people to forget that freedom as a political institution had arisen not by human beings 'striving for freedom' in the sense of release from restraints, but by their striving for the protection of a known secure individual domain. Rousseau led people to forget that rules of conduct necessarily constrain and that order is their product; and that these rules, precisely by limiting the range of means that each individual may use for his purposes, greatly extend the range of ends each can successfully pursue.

It was Rousseau who - declaring in the opening statement of The Social Contract that 'man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains', and wanting to free men from all 'artificial' restraints - made what had been called the savage the virtual hero of progressive intellectuals, urged people to shake off the very restraints to which they owed their productivity and numbers, and produced a conception of liberty that became the greatest obstacle to its attainment. (...) The admittedly great seductive appeal of this view hardly owes its power (whatever it may claim) to reason and evidence. (...) Despite these contradictions, there is no doubt that Rousseau's outcry was effective or that, during the past two centuries, it has shaken our civilisation. Moreover, irrationalist as it is, it nonetheless did appeal precisely to progressivists by its Cartesian insinuation that we might use reason to obtain and justify direct gratification of our natural instincts. Friedrich Hayek , The Fatal Conceit (1988), Ch. 4: The Revolt of Instinct and Reason The first great frontal assault on the Enlightenment was launched by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).

Rousseau has a well-deserved reputation as the bad boy of eighteenth century French philosophy. In the context of Enlightenment intellectual culture, Rousseau’s was a major dissenting voice. He was an admirer of all things Spartan—the Sparta of militaristic and feudal communalism—and a despiser of all things Athenian—the classical Athens of commerce, cosmopolitanism, and the high arts. Civilization is thoroughly corrupting, Rousseau argued -- not only the oppressive feudal system of eighteenth-century France with its decadent and parasitical aristocracy, but also its Enlightenment alternative with its exaltation of reason, property, the arts and sciences. Name a dominant feature of the Enlightenment, and Rousseau was against it. Philosopher Stephen Hicks , Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (2004), Tempe, AZ: Scholargy Press, p. 92. Thus you see, [Rousseau] is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness.

… The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition. M - R[ edit ] In truth,Rousseau was a genius whose real influence cannot be traced with precision because it pervaded all the thought that followed him...Men will always be sharply divided about Rousseau: for he released imagination as well as sentimentalism; he increased men’s desire for justice as well as confusing their minds, and he gave the poor hope even though the rich could make use of his arguments. Kingsley Martin , French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1962). In one direction at least Rousseau’s influence was a steady one: he discredited force as a basis for the State, convinced men that authority was legitimate only when founded in rational consent and that no arguments from passing expediency could justify a government in disregarding individual freedom or in failing to promote social equality. Kingsley Martin , French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1962). It is not enough to say that Jean-Jacques is close to us; he is one of us.

His contemporaries and the generation that followed his have retained his redundancy and his eloquence. François Mauriac , Men I hold Great, Kennikat Press, 1971. [M]y position has nothing in common with a Rousseauistic optimism about human "nature.” […] Rousseau's pedagogy is profoundly manipulative. This does not always seem to be recognized by educators, but it has been convincingly demonstrated and documented. Alice Miller (1972) on Rousseau's educational philosophy as an exemplar of “ poisonous pedagogy ”, in For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence The disciples of Jean Jacques Rousseau who raved about nature and the blissful condition of man in the state of nature did not take notice of the fact that the means of subsistence are scarce and that the natural state of man is extreme poverty and insecurity. Ludwig von Mises , Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Revolution (1957), p.

173 Thus, in the eighteenth century, when nearly all the instructed, and all those of the uninstructed who were led by them, were lost in admiration of what is called civilisation, and of the marvels of modern science, literature, and philosophy, and while greatly overrating the amount of unlikeness between the men of modern and those of ancient times, indulged the belief that the whole of the difference was in their own favour; with what a salutary shock did the paradoxes of Rousseau explode like bombshells in the midst, dislocating the compact mass of one-sided opinion, and forcing its elements to recombine in a better form and with additional ingredients. Not that the current opinions were on the whole farther from the truth than Rousseau's were; on the contrary, they were nearer to it; they contained more of positive truth, and very much less of error. Nevertheless there lay in Rousseau's doctrine, and has floated down the stream of opinion along with it, a considerable amount of exactly those truths which the popular opinion wanted; and these are the deposit which was left behind when the flood subsided.

The superior worth of simplicity of life, the enervating and demoralising effect of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from cultivated minds since Rousseau wrote; and they will in time produce their due effect, though at present needing to be asserted as much as ever, and to be asserted by deeds, for words, on this subject, have nearly exhausted their power.

Question: Who wrote, in translation, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains"?
Answer: (Jean Jacques)Rousseau